Beyond PINES, the Evergreen ILS is deployed worldwide in approximately 1,800 libraries, and is used to power a number of statewide consortial catalogs.[2][3][4][5][6]

In 2007,[7] the original Evergreen development team formed a commercial company around the software, Equinox Software, which provides custom support, development, migration, training, and consultation for Evergreen. As of 2014, several more companies and groups also provide support and related services for Evergreen.[8]

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Evergreen was developed by the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) to support 252 public libraries in the Public Information Network for Electronic Services (PINES) consortium.[9] Development began in June 2004 when state librarian Lamar Veatch announced in an open letter that after reviewing options available, GPLS decided to develop its own library automation system. GPLS believed it could develop a system customized to fit its needs better at a lower cost than the fees currently being paid.[10] Programmers in the GPLS developed the project for two years, and PINES successfully completed the transition to Evergreen in September 5, 2006. In the next two years, the PINES consortium increased to over 270 libraries and five other systems in the United States and Canada implemented Evergreen.

The software started receiving contributions from other libraries and developers in 2007.[11] 2009 saw the first Evergreen International Conference.[12] In 2012, the community joined the Software Freedom Conservancy and formed an oversight board.[13]

Development priorities for Evergreen are that it be stable, robust, flexible, secure, and user-friendly.

Evergreen's features include:

Circulation: for staff to check items in and out to patrons

Cataloging: to add items to the library’s collection and input information, classifying and indexing those items. Evergreen is known for an extremely flexible indexing system that allows for a high level of customization and by default uses Library of Congress MODS as its standard.

Online public access catalog (OPAC): a public catalog, or discovery interface, for patrons to find and request books, view their account information, and save book information in Evergreen "bookbags." The OPAC received a makeover in early 2009 with the new, optional skin, Craftsman. There is also an optional Children's OPAC. Various patron services such as paying bills by PayPal and Stripe, optional retaining of circulation history, book bags and more.

Self Service - Evergreen comes with self checkout and registration options that can be activated by the libraries.

Evergreen also features the Open Scalable Request Framework (OpenSRF, pronounced 'open surf'), a stateful, decentralized service architecture that allows developers to create applications for Evergreen with a minimum of knowledge of its structure.[16]

The business logic of Evergreen is written primarily in Perl and PostgreSQL, with a few optimized sections rewritten in C. The catalog interface is primarily constructed using Template Toolkit with some JavaScript. The staff client user interface is written in Mozilla's XUL (XML + JavaScript) before 3.0 and is a web based staff client built using AngularJS and related technologies as of 3.0. Python is used for the internationalization build infrastructure. EDI functionality for the acquisitions system depends upon Ruby support but work targeting 3.0 or later will remove this to handle EDI generation natively.[17]

Evergreen runs on Linux servers and uses PostgreSQL for its backend database. The staff client used in day-to-day operations by library staff runs on Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computers and is built on XULRunner, a Mozilla-based runtime that uses the same technology stack as Firefox and allows for a browser-independent offline mode. The online public access catalog (OPAC) used by library patrons is accessed in a web browser. As of version 3.0 due for release in late 2017 the technical preview of the web based staff client will be promoted to production use and the XUL based staff client that required local machine installation will begin being phased out. [18]